Debugging the undebuggable: building observability into probabilistic AI systems

A tutorial shows how to add observability to a small AI Q&A service built with retrieval, external tools, and structured output checks.

It uses OpenTelemetry and logging to trace non-deterministic behavior that traditional logs often miss.

The setup helps engineers debug silent failures in retrieval quality, tool calls, and model reasoning.

The example stack includes FastAPI, FAISS, BM25, LangChain, and GPT-4o mini.